A definitive guide to releasing your best software

Software is ubiquitous. It’s in our cars, bank accounts, healthcare, infrastructure—virtually everything we encounter in modern life. Market survival demands that every company, to some extent, become a software company. A global study found that roughly 70% of “top economic performers” differentiate themselves from competitors through software.[1]

Unfortunately, building and delivering great software is hard. Extremely hard. 

• Great software is shipped quickly with confidence. But many development teams release infrequently. And due to fear, they only release at midnight or on weekends.
• Great software works. But outages afflict many organizations.
• Great software delights users with personalized experiences. But many teams indiscriminately ship the same generic offering to their entire audience (hardly an “experience”).
• Great software improves and has a material impact on the business. But many teams lack a scalable way to run the experiments needed to inform such improvements.

In this guide, we’ll examine four major barriers to building your best software, how to overcome them with a feature management platform like LaunchDarkly, and how other top organizations have thus triumphed. Moreover, we’ll explain some of the difficulties of building feature management capabilities in-house.

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[1] “Three new mandates for capturing a digital transformation’s full value,” McKinsey Digital: June, 2022.